Jodie Evans || If you’re reading this, chances are you’re exhausted. You’re watching the polycrises of our time unfold — climate catastrophe, endless war, deepening inequality, communities torn apart — and you’re overwhelmed.
This is what the war economy wants you to feel: overwhelmed, powerless, isolated, and paralyzed. Because when you’re frozen in that state, you’re available to be used. You’ll keep consuming, keep competing, keep producing, keep on the hamster wheel — feeding the very system that’s destroying life on this planet.
Worse than that, war serves the war economy; we will not stop it until we stop the war economy, and to do that we must replace it with a peace economy.
Welcome Home: Understanding Economy
The word “economy” comes from the Greek oikonomia — the management of home. But somewhere along the way, we lost our connection to home sweet home: the place that nourishes us, our community, and the living planet itself. We’ve adopted the bad habits of destroying what is meant to nurture us.
The question at the heart of the Local Peace Economy project is simple but profound: What if we could remember what home means? What if we could practice our way back to being in relationship with each other and the Earth?
This isn’t about creating something entirely new. The peace economy already exists — it’s the reason any of us are alive. It’s every moment of care, every act of sharing, every gesture of generosity that weaves the fabric of actual life. It’s the neighbor who checks on you, the community garden that feeds families, the mutual aid network that shows up in crisis, the free library on the corner. It’s every instance where love and connection take precedence over transaction and extraction.
The work before us is to recognize the peace economy that’s already operating, to divest from the war economy that’s killing us, and to consciously cultivate conditions for life to thrive — starting locally, starting now.
The War Economy: Naming What’s Killing Us
Let’s be clear about what we’re up against. The war economy is the overarching system of our times — the extractive, destructive, oppressive structure that relies on violence, materialism, and the breakdown of community. The war economy is the entire cultural and economic system that treats everything — land, water, people, relationships — as resources to be extracted for profit.
The war economy promotes a culture that devalues community, sharing, and play while overvaluing hard work, productivity, and individualism to the grave detriment of our mental and physical health. It’s the force behind the disruption of biodiversity, the wiping out of ecosystems, the degradation of social justice, increasing privatization, the decay of the commons, and our shrinking capacity to be in relationship with each other.
Here’s how the war economy operates in your daily life:
It forces you into alienation — separating you from yourself, others, and the world. It makes you believe that self-sufficiency is strength and that depending on others is weakness, when the truth is that no living being survives in isolation.
It drives you into competition instead of cooperation, making you see others as rivals rather than recognizing that the “fittest” in nature are those who understand interdependence.
It keeps you rushing and productive at all times, stealing your capacity for rest, reflection, and the wisdom that comes from slowing down. It needs you to be exhausted because exhausted people don’t have energy for revolution.
It turns your relationships into transactions, making every interaction about exchange value rather than human connection. It monetizes what was once free — food, water, land, care — and forces you to experience abundance as scarcity.
It keeps you distracted and overwhelmed, flooding you with information while starving you of knowledge. It weaponizes your heart and mind through media, keeping you reactive rather than investigative, paralyzed rather than engaged.
The war economy doesn’t want you to notice that joy, pleasure, creativity, and deep connection are free and abundant. It doesn’t want you to remember that you have everything you need to create a beautiful future when you’re in community with others.
Most insidiously, the war economy has taught us to police ourselves and each other, to stay narrow, to believe there’s only one way to survive. It has many of us convinced that we need it, even as it kills us.
The Peace Economy: Recognizing What Sustains Life
Now here’s the beautiful truth: the peace economy is everywhere. It’s been here all along. It’s operating right now in ways large and small, visible and invisible. Every time care flows between people, every time resources are shared, every time someone acts from love rather than transaction — that’s the peace economy.
The peace economy includes teachers who pour their hearts into students, caregivers who tend to the vulnerable, community organizers who weave networks of support, makers who create with their hands, gardeners who grow food to share, artists who offer beauty, healers who tend to wounds, and every person who has managed to keep part of themselves out of the machinery of destruction.
It’s neighbors being there for neighbors. It’s skill shares and mutual aid efforts. It’s community gardens and free food fridges. It’s the relocalization of supply chains, cooperatives and collaborative projects, clothing swaps and seed exchanges. It’s free libraries and community grief-tending. It’s neighbor-led safety efforts and emergency responses. It’s protecting and enjoying public spaces and solidarity organizing that rises up from the commons.
Around the world, this movement has many names: buen vivir in Latin America, degrowth in Europe, the solidarity economy movement globally. What matters is that these approaches center connection over division, peace over war, relationships over transactions, and community over individualism.
The peace economy recognizes what is of true worth and value: love, peace, expression, community, and relationships. It understands that we are all interconnected, that seven generations matter, that the Earth is not a resource to be exploited but a living system we’re part of.
Why Local? Why Now?
You might be thinking: “This sounds beautiful, but I can’t solve climate change or end war or fix capitalism.” You’re right. You can’t. And that’s exactly why we start local.
When you’re feeling overwhelmed by bad news about government dysfunction, climate catastrophe, and disasters around the world — when you experience heartbreak and desperation over the tsunami waves of disaster that have already hit and those you feel will inevitably break closer to home — you have a choice. Rather than giving up and preparing to drown, you can pivot into cultivating the conditions conducive to life, starting exactly where you are.
We say “local” peace economy because what each of us can affect is what is closest to us. When you start local, the big patterns reveal themselves in the small. What is local is also what you can be in relationship with. The global world is experienced through media, which is weaponized by the war economy to capture your attention and energy while keeping you disconnected from your actual lived reality.
By engaging locally, you floss disinformation from your brain and build a stronger foundation with reality. When you’re in your own experiences and in creation with your community, you learn what is needed for life. Your experiences and your community nourish you, inform you, raise the next questions, and root you in life itself.
We live in a time of information explosion but knowledge drought. The knowledge you develop cultivating a local peace economy will root you, ground you, and build your resilience in ways that doom-scrolling never will.
The 23 Pivots: Practicing Our Way Out
Here’s where the work gets real and practical. Recognizing the war economy and peace economy is important, but transformation requires practice. The war economy has trained us into habits that feel automatic — rushing, competing, isolating, consuming. These aren’t character flaws; they’re survival strategies in a system designed to exploit us.
The way out is to practice different habits. To pivot, again and again, from war economy patterns to peace economy practices. The Local Peace Economy Workbook offers 23 pivots — invitations to notice the addictions the War Economy forces upon you to survive, and offerings to consciously choose different ways of being:
From Alienation to Connection: Notice where you experience separation from self, others, and the world. Practice connection by showing up to community spaces, gathering people together, and actively listening and learning from each other.
From Competition to Interdependence: Witness where you’re drawn into competition and what it costs you. Consider what it means to excel without competing — to offer your best as a contribution to the whole.
From Transactional to Relational: Chart how transactionality creeps into your daily life. Where does the speed of transaction override the slower pace of relating and truly seeing another person? Practice slowing down and valuing people as human, including yourself.
From Productivity to Engagement: Notice how you’re driven by being productive versus moving from deep engagement with life. Create time for rest and nourishment. Recognize the difference between being used by outside needs and engaging from your own values and commitments.
From Scarcity to Abundance: Define what is “enough.” What do you really need? What do you already have? What can you share? Practice giving something away each day — not as a transaction but as a way of relating.
From Rushing to Wisdom: Notice when you feel rushed. Ask where it’s coming from. Take a few deep breaths and experience the situation from a place of relationship. Build trust in your intuition and wisdom.
From Consumption to Creation: Identify where you mindlessly over-consume and replace that time with creating something for and with your community. What does your community need that you could create together?
From Individualism to Self-Responsibility: Write out what you see as pertaining to you alone, then brainstorm all the ways these things are actually connected with others. Practice thinking seven generations ahead, considering the impact of your actions on those who will come after.
These pivots aren’t meant to be done once and checked off a list. They’re lifetime practices. Our workbook suggests spending a day with each pivot at first, then returning to them again and again — maybe spending a week with each one next time, then focusing on the ones that challenge you most.
The point isn’t perfection. The war economy will pull you back into old habits, especially when you’re exhausted. That’s when you need celebration and joy, not judgment. You’re not in a hurry. You’re finding new ways to be present with life, and that itself removes you from the war economy.
Community: The Living Structure of Peace
Individual practice matters, but transformation happens in community. The peace economy isn’t something you can cultivate alone — and this is by design. Community is both the site and structure through which local peace economies become possible.
Community is the network of mycelium that binds us to one another. It gives us meaning by entangling our responsibilities and abilities to flourish with a collective greater than anything achievable alone. Community plays a strong role in fostering an understanding that we are part of a whole beyond the self.
Community inherently disrupts the frameworks of the war economy by nurturing a culture of solidarity, interdependence, mutual support, and relationality. In community, people matter because people matter. Period. Not because of their productivity, not because of their utility, not because of what they can offer — but simply because they are.
Here’s the other truth about community: it’s messy. If everyone in a group is getting along all the time, you probably have a cult, not a community. Communities are diverse, they challenge your beliefs, they’re sometimes uncomfortable. This is where your practices will be challenged and grow stronger.
Leadership will likely rise within a community, and that’s good — leadership is a skillset, and it’s not inherently hierarchical. The invitation is to create community containers where leadership is a task, not a superseding power. Everyone brings something to offer, and everyone’s offering is of value.
Organizing for Peace
Community organizing is a tool for connecting and building local peace economies. Bottom-up organizing brings people from the margins to the center to collectively envision and build the future we all desire.
A fundamental error of the war economy is that it fails to look to the intelligence of the collective — particularly the wisdom and lived expertise of oppressed people. Everyone has value and something to contribute in a peace economy, and organizers facilitate these contributions toward cultivating home sweet home.
The principles of peace economy organizing include:
Collectivism: People come together in egalitarian ways that allow everyone time and space for input. The grounded expertise of those most affected by the war economy guides solutions forward.
Empowerment: The role isn’t to create demands and organize people around them, but to discover the demands the community has already identified and find ways to resolve them together.
Community Engagement and Leadership: The relationship between “the people” and “the leadership” merges into one, based on true equity and desire to work together. Governance is consensus-based and agreed upon within the continually engaged community.
When organizing, start by asking: How well are the needs of those in your community being met? Where are there gaps in access to care, resources, and supportive services? How is the war economy devastating your community, and what’s at the root of those abuses? How can your community organize to address these needs and model new ways?
Culture: Making Revolution Irresistible
As Toni Cade Bambara said, “As a cultural worker who belongs to an oppressed people, my job is to make revolution irresistible.” Culture is a powerful tool in the pathways toward a peace economy because culture is what binds us.
Culture is expressed through song, food, literature, poetry, art, and much more. It’s a mechanism for storytelling and shaping the collective imagination and understandings of the world. Cultural expressions plant the seeds of future visions and possibilities.
Right now, our dominant culture is based in the war economy, and we’re called to wash it away as we cultivate a peace economy culture. Joy, collective care, and kinship are essential components of the culture at the root of the peace economy.
All social movements of significance have understood the role of music, art, and cultural expression in collective movement-building. You attract people to transformation based on aesthetics and beauty as much as on analysis and argument.
Notice where you access culture that is transactional, rooted in consumerism, or a proxy for culture — instead of culture that is deeply felt, disturbing to the status quo, breaking open narrow confines, and leading to life, love, and connection.
How can you nourish a culture of peace, love, joy, celebration, and connection in your community? What cultural practices — food, art, literature, music, language — nourish you and those around you?
The Ecosystem: You’re Not Alone
One of the most powerful aspects of the Local Peace Economy project is the ongoing mapping of peace economy projects happening around the United States. This living, breathing map shows that you’re not alone, that communities everywhere are already doing this work.
The ecosystem includes:
- Mutual aid networks and community care systems
- Cooperatives and worker-owned businesses
- Community land trusts and affordable housing initiatives
- Tool libraries and resource-sharing programs
- Community gardens and food sovereignty projects
- Time banks and skill-sharing networks
- Free stores and gift economy experiments
- Community-based safety and emergency response
- Re-indigenization efforts and land back movements
- And countless other expressions of peace economy values
When you engage with this map, you can see where your skills, passions, and location might connect with existing efforts. You can find inspiration for what’s possible in your own community. You can reach out and learn from those already doing this work.
Remember: you don’t have to reinvent everything. The peace economy already exists. Your work is to recognize it, connect with it, strengthen it, and practice your way more deeply into it.
The Stories We Tell
The stories we do and don’t tell about ourselves and these times shape the direction of our lives and cultures. This is why war propaganda is so effective — and why sharing peace economy stories is so vital.
Those who study cultural anthropology and human origins are finding that cultural stories — the things people collectively believe about ourselves and our capacities — have forever shaped human societies. By shifting those narratives now, we have the realistic potential to evolve on purpose as a species.
The stories shared through the Local Peace Economy project highlight paths forward. They show ways through the storm. They offer an antidote to the overwhelm, stress, and hopelessness that seems to be everywhere. And that antidote is the people who are planting seeds of hope and connection, weaving webs of care and love.
Reshaping the narrative and showing through story how better ways of being are not only possible but already exist everywhere is a key ingredient in the local peace economy. These stories show the processes, challenges, and joys of people building their local peace economies, inspiring each other and expanding our understanding of what’s possible.
Beginning the Journey: Your Invitation
If you’ve read this far, something is calling to you. Maybe it’s exhaustion with the war economy. Maybe it’s grief for what’s been lost. Maybe it’s a spark of hope that another way is possible. Maybe it’s all of these.
Here’s your invitation: Give yourself nine months with this process. Nine months to listen, learn, pivot from war economy habits to peace economy practices, and develop your capacity to be a contributing member of your community.
Start with awareness. Begin to notice where you recognize the war economy in your day and where you find the peace economy. Do this for a few weeks. Explore what is local and nurturing. Where are the attempts to create commons? Where are the co-ops, the sharing communities, the spaces where people are engaged in a culture of connection?
Find your community. You can’t do this alone — and you don’t have to. It might be a local peace economy project that already exists. Like a new language, the peace economy is easiest to learn through immersion. If you aren’t finding one, bring together a group of friends and start answering the questions in the workbook together. Gather once a week in reflection and sharing.
Make a commitment to record what you learn each day. Commitment is key to this path: commitment to showing up, commitment to your practices, commitment to your community. This kind of commitment contributes to a more beautiful future instead of making another capitalist rich.
The Local Peace Economy Workbook offers a structured path through this territory, with reflection questions, mapping exercises, and practices for each pivot. The website provides stories, resources, and the ecosystem map showing peace economy projects across the country.
But more than any resource, what you need is the willingness to begin. To notice. To practice. To connect. To grieve and to celebrate. To root yourself in community and in values that serve life.
Follow What Arises
One of the most radical aspects of this work is the invitation to not have it all figured out. The war economy has conditioned us to planning and knowing exactly where we’re going. But when you start small with your values and your community, parts of yourself that have been devalued and made dormant come back to life.
Follow what arises. Let new ideas emerge. Leave room for discovery. Don’t be in a hurry. Let something new come to life.
There is no Armageddon. The folly of our fretting serves nothing. Your energy is needed to create a more beautiful future. Engagement is how we create the hope that pulls us forward.
Even small acts have cumulative effects. When you engage locally, even in ways that might seem insignificant, you learn what’s inside you that you haven’t been sharing. You inspire others. You seed a flowering that takes time to grow.
As adrienne maree brown reminds us, “What each of us practices at the scale of our individual lives is what is then possible for us at a large scale.” You are a microcosm of all the possible liberation, justice, pleasure, and honesty in the universe. Act accordingly.
A More Beautiful Future Is Already Here
Here’s the truth the war economy can’t stomach: another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, you can hear her breathing. (
That world is being built by people in communities everywhere who are practicing their way out of extraction and into connection. It’s being built by people who refuse to let the war economy have the last word. It’s being built by people who understand that we be many and they be few, that they need us more than we need them.
The techno-corporate-fascistic horror will collapse if we refuse to buy what they’re selling — their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.
You’re invited to join this refusal, this revolution, this remembering of who we truly are: interconnected beings whose survival and flourishing depend on each other and on our relationships with the living Earth.
Start local. Start now. Start with one pivot, one practice, one connection. Let the Local Peace Economy Workbook and website be your guides, but let your own community and your own heart be your teachers.
The future is counting on you. Not the individual superhero version of you that the war economy sold you, but the real you — the you that is part of something much larger, the you that knows how to care and share and create and grieve and celebrate and organize and love.
Welcome home. The peace economy has been waiting for you.
Join the Local Peace Economy Community!
Jodie Evans is the co-founder of CODEPINK and the after-school writing program 826LA, and serves on the CODEPINK Board of Directors. She also founded the Local Peace Economy Campaign. She has been a visionary advocate for peace for several decades. An inspired motivator, Jodie invigorates nascent activists and re-invigorates seasoned activists through her ever-evolving, always exciting methods to promote peace. Whether in board rooms or war zones, legislative offices or neighborhood streets, Jodie’s enthusiasm for a world at peace infuses conciliation, optimism and activism wherever she goes.
Image credit: Kalaw to Inle Trek, Piktour | Neville Wootton
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